I’m getting the impression that developers vary substantially in what they consider tedium, or meaningful.

Sure, and that goes even for myself. Like for example, on some projects maybe I'll be more interested in exploring a particular architectural choice than actually focusing on the details of the feature. It ultimately doesn't matter, the point is that you can choose where to spend your attention, instead of being forced to always go through all the motions even for things that are just irrelevant boilerplate

Shockingly, software developers are people, and are as varied as people are elsewhere. Particularly since it became (relatively) mainstream.